Posted on 12/30/2016 11:39:26 AM PST by Zakeet
Much has been said about the ways we expect our oncoming fleet of driverless cars to change the way we live—remaking us all into passengers, rewiring our economy, retooling our views of ownership, and reshaping our cities and roads.
They will also change the way we die. As technology takes the wheel, road deaths due to driver error will begin to diminish. It's a transformative advancement, but one that comes with consequences in an unexpected place: organ donation.
[Snip]
It's not difficult to do the math on how driverless cars could change the equation. An estimated 94 percent of motor-vehicle accidents involve some kind of a driver error. As the number of vehicles with human operators falls, so too will the preventable fatalities. In June, Christopher A. Hart, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said, "Driverless cars could save many if not most of the 32,000 lives that are lost every year on our streets and highways." Even if self-driving cars only realize a fraction of their projected safety benefits, a decline in the number of available organs could begin as soon as the first wave of autonomous and semiautonomous vehicles hits the road—threatening to compound our nation’s already serious shortages.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
“Not to worry. The US feral government can always Hastings people that have tissue types that match important people.”
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I’m not aware of any celebrity - no matter how much damage they’ve chosen to inflict on their body - who has died while waiting for a transplant. Might be some, but I don’t know of them.
“The survival lottery”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_survival_lottery
What are you, some kind of Luddite? /s
Just slap a “gizzard” tax on the illegals being returned to Mexico, based on a coin toss. Each alien must give up one body part, from the group consisting of one eyeball, one heart, one kidney, piece of liver, a gonad, no more than four feet of intestine, no more than four toes, no more than two fingers, and one ear. Obviously, this could be a bit tenuous in some respects.
I suspect software blunders and mechanical/sensor errors will keep the body count where they want it.
You’d be surprised to know how many of the “big boys” autoland.
Which is the same as a self driving car that has a driver/passenger waiting to take control if needed.
“You’d be surprised to know how many of the “big boys” autoland.”
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Airlines use pilots for just decorative purposes then? Human judgement is irreplaceable.
Ever paid for a bag of chips from a vending machine only to watch the item not drop down to the open slot?
dont worry about the organ donation supply as long as the driverless vehicles keep getting into wrecks...
That's the dilemma the auto industry is facing as it lays the groundwork for introducing full automation in these vehicles.
“Second of all, and I can’t stress this enough, we won’t have fully autonomous driving cars for at least 50 years.”
I don’t suppose you’d care to place a small wager on that...? We could use a much shorter time horizon, say 15 years. I think in reality it’ll be less than 10.
(My definition of “fully autonomous car” is that you will climb in, select a destination reachable on the current fuel supply, then the car will drive to said destination and park with no human driving inputs.)
I remember a story where, because of the shortage of accident victims and longer life spans, the number of crimes eligible for the death penalty was increased.
I work professionally in a field where we are dealing with the implications of these "self-driving vehicles" on infrastructure and on traffic operations, and I believe we're much closer to a 50-year horizon than a 10-15 year horizon for what you describe.
Keep in mind that the technology isn't really the biggest challenge here. The technology already exists to do this -- and it has existed for much longer than most people probably realize (my first exposure to automated vehicles was on a test track way back in the early 1990s when I was still an undergraduate in engineering school).
The biggest challenges are two-fold:
1. Getting all of the state laws and legal standards updated to reflect a major change in how the legal system treats automobiles (from personal/company liability to product liability).
2. Related to the previous point ... Getting the auto industry to figure out how to mitigate their legal exposure in a way that doesn't force these companies to build so many safety measures into these vehicles that the technology is basically useless.
One of the factors in the banning of DDT was that in 1970 some enviro freaks actually wanted people to die because they were so conned by the population scare of the time.
Of course, legalizing the sale of organs will solve the problem.
You can’t win for losing.
What about the dream of high speed rail and public transportation for all?
And all democrats have to do to secure a large number of donors are make gun free zones in black communities.
Now this news is gonna keep me up tonight.
Self-driving cars will never happen.
Because no automated machinery ever failed...
How about harvesting them from illegal entrants into this country?
Technically they don’t exist and it would offset any costs that they run up while trespassing here.
< /JonathanSwift >
Short organs worsened?
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